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Promise Zone
OP-ED: Promise Zone keeps pushing for regional progress
Participants worked on an exercise during the December grant-writing workshop.
By Andy Brack, Center for a Better South | There’s a palpable sense of energy flowing through the six counties of the southern tip of South Carolina in the federally-designated Promise Zone, which is now a year and a half old.
- Read in the Hilton Head Island Packet
Walk along a downtown street or drive past expanding businesses and you get a tingling that things are happening. Two years ago, the SouthernCarolina Alliance, lead partner of the Promise Zone, was about the only regional organization that worked to pull people together to develop projects to benefit the area. Fortunately, the organization had the foresight in 2014 to try to win the Promise Zone designation as a way to bolster inter-agency collaboration and get local, state and federal organizations in silos to come out into the open and work better together. Read more
Wilson co-sponsors bill to spur job creation, investment in Promise Zone
U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., is a chief co-sponsor of legislation that will create new tax credits to give incentives to businesses to hire residents of federally-designated Promise Zones like the one that is in part of his congressional district.
Wilson
The bill, the Promise Zone Job Creation Act, also would encourage new investments to bring property, equipment or software to hard hit communities in the zones. South Carolina’s Promise Zone includes all or parts of Allendale, Bamberg, Barnwell, Colleton, Hampton and Jasper. The designation, which provides priority help for organizations seeking federal grants and loans that help the area, was awarded in April 2015. Read more
ON THE RADIO: Zone to bring change
In a Feb. 24 story about the S.C. Promise Zone, NPR Marketplace reporter Caitlin Esch takes a look at how the region’s new designation will help it to get priority consideration for federal grant and loan packages for the next 10 years.